This year my participation is all about the work we’ve done lately helping to bring along Blue Button + … a great initiative that takes the best of what the VA and CMS did with Blue Button, adds in the awesomeness of Direct messaging, tosses that up with some structured C/CDA data, and turns it all into something really exciting --- a way for providers and other “data holders” to automatically share data with citizens.

And frankly, that data is rocket fuel for innovation and progress. The brief panel talk I gave today tried to showcase just how real that innovation and progress can be. I’ve shared my slides here in case folks are interested, but the punch line is this one:

Here’s what’s going on up there. I took one of the VA’s sample Blue Button files and uploaded to HealthVault. HV parsed the file and automatically extracted each data item as structured data: medications, emergency contacts, blood pressure, glucose and other tests, allergies, and so on.

I then opened up a few HealthVault-connected applications. I did NOTHING to the data other than upload the file, and here’s just a sampling of what I got, for free:

An emergency profile card with all the core information ready to print and carry in a wallet, purse or backpack.

All my information in the popular iTriage app on the iPhone and Android, so my records are in my pocket live wherever I go.

Personalized guidance and education from the American Heart Association as to what my data means for me and how I can take action to be healthier.

That’s what fit on the slide and in my timeslot. So I didn’t show how emergency information can be available to first responders in the Next of Kin Registry, or how it could be used with the AARP health record available to all members, or how it would prepopulate a family history in the surgeon general’s My Family Health Portrait tool, or…… with hundreds of connected apps, you get the idea.

It was pretty fun. And yet, for some reason HealthVault always seems the best kept secret at these things. People are frankly amazed when they see what we’re doing every day, in production, with great partners and real citizens and providers. But then the discussion kind of collapses in on itself again and we speak as if personally-controlled data was some kind of aspirational someday thing.

Baloney! Patients are empowered TODAY and we need to uplevel the conversation from just moving data around (we’re helping to take care of that), and start talking about and expecting real value and usability out of the ecosystem. We’re almost there --- so keep swimming!

Looking forward to day 2 as an observer only --- especially for the 9:55am slot when our friends at Get Real Health show off their work on the main stage. Now there’s a company that gets it. Woo hoo!